Well, she had to feed them some time. Alberta was so big, who knows what she might be driven to if her dinner were delayed—she might start eating the cage. Geraldine dragged her feet past Violetta’s room out to the laundry, stepping over a basket of clothes, and picking up a handful of raisins from a bowl on the kitchen bench on her way past. She took a separate handful of pellets from the container in the laundry and trod out across the dry yellow lawn to their cage.
‘Dinner time!’ she said brightly, then stopped still. The cage door was open. She’d forgotten again. Not that it mattered much, except for the danger of a local cat leaping in and attacking them. She’d have to be more careful—Alma would not appreciate a mangled Alberta.
She bent over and started shaking down the pellets, like manna from heaven, she thought with a sigh. The pigs were under the blanket. It was really getting so smelly and threadbare—she knew she should replace it, or wash it at least. Imagine all the diseases that could be breeding there.
The unappetising grey pellets fell to rest on the chicken-wire, rolling a little here and there. Perhaps not all that much like manna from heaven. She wondered how they had all got on together—at least so far there were no overt signs of a personality clash. The pet books claimed every guinea-pig had its own distinct personality, although she’d found it hard to ever tell any difference between Milly and Martha. Still, no one was sulking in the corner, feeling left out, and there were no loose bits of fur from fighting.
She took hold of one moist corner of the blanket and gave it a shake. Out dashed Milly. She shook it again. Out scrambled Martha, instantly at Milly’s side. She lifted the blanket right out in the air, like a nervous magician, unsure of what she was about to reveal.
‘Alberta?’ she said.
There was nothing there.
Geraldine stared. It was not one of those situations when you lose something and you can keep on searching over and over through all your drawers in case you overlooked it the first time. There was nothing to overlook here. There was Milly, there was Martha and there were the guinea-pig pellets. There was no Alberta.
She was gone.
It was not possible. Where could she have gone? There was no hole in the cage, no gap in the wire. The only points of exit were the cupboard doors on the top. Surely no guinea-pig, even one the unusual size and strength of Alberta, could have stretched up on her hind legs and heaved herself out the open door with her shoulders. What terrible necessity could have inspired such super-porcine feats of strength and cunning? Had poor Alberta understood what Alma had said about her father and the brown-paper bag? But Geraldine reprimanded herself. As if a guinea-pig could understand English …
Milly and Martha sat panting in the corner, eyeing the pellets. Geraldine looked at them, with a sudden suspicion. They couldn’t have. Couldn’t have. Could they? It’ll end in cannibalism, Ezra had said. But that was just Ezra carrying on. Milly and Martha couldn’t possibly have eaten Alberta, no matter how hungry they were. All right, she was late that morning, and hadn’t had time to give them their usual lettuce and carrot, but she still couldn’t believe they could have swallowed a fellow pig twice their size. Although there was that snake she’d read about in India that swallowed a fourteen-year-old boy. But it was ridiculous. It was just Ezra carrying on. Honestly. Cannibalism. That Ezra …
Ezra!
The word spun in her head with the speed and venom of a bullet. Of course—that was it. Ezra. Who else? She might have known. It must be. Ezra. He’d crawled over the fence knowing she’d be late back from school, and liberated Alberta, without the slightest compunction. He’d let her go, just like that. Not thinking for a moment of Geraldine, of Alma, or even of Alberta herself.
Because how would poor Alberta cope in the wild suburban streets, with cars, cats and garbage trucks? Not to mention roller-blades and swimming pools, and poisonous snail baits. She wouldn’t last a minute, the poor little (biggish) thing. In her rage, Geraldine managed to endow the redoubtable Alberta with the meekest and most unassuming of personalities.
Geraldine felt a kind of thoughtless fury with Ezra as if someone were doing a scribble pattern in her head. She gazed over the fence through the dusk at Ezra’s house. Somehow she didn’t have the power in her to confront him just now. She could imagine his cold ruthless responses, completely without regret for his actions.
She stood in the darkening garden, enraged. Milly and Martha were squeaking softly now, like dinner conversation. Perhaps they were discussing Alberta, and what had happened to their brief and robust visitor, wondering where she was. That makes three of us, thought Geraldine.
A shrug of night wind moved the hanging branches of the lemon tree. Beneath the round black tyre-swing, something stirred. A break in the dark. A flash of white.
But Geraldine was angry and saw nothing. She tossed her head back like a horse refusing a fence, turned around and stomped indoors.
6 · Something White
Violetta’s mother told her that their father had an ulcer, which is something you get from worrying too much. It meant he had to calm down and be very careful about what he ate, how much he ate and what time he ate it. The doctor had supplied him with quite a complicated diet printed on official-looking yellow cards. If you get ulcers from worrying, thought Violetta, it wouldn’t be long before the rest of them got one as well, from worrying about her father’s.
But there’s no time, Violetta roused on herself, to waste on worrying. An ulcer is not too serious, after all, with the proper treatment. Her father simply had to be sensible and cautious. She sighed. It might not be so easy.
Violetta was almost always late coming home after school. She was so brainy, there wasn’t enough time in the ordinary school day to fit in all her lessons, so frequently she had to stay behind afterwards. She didn’t mind; in fact she liked it. The classrooms echoed, the playground was empty, the only sounds were of teachers starting up their cars or music groups practising in the hall. There were scarcely any school children on the late ferry, and she sat on the deck watching the sun set, red and yellow, over the harbour.
The day after they found out her father had an ulcer, Violetta came home just before six o’clock. Neither her mother nor Geraldine were visible anywhere, although some glutinous-smelling pulse was boiling on the stove—this was something recommended on the doctor’s yellow program. Violetta sat straight-backed on the sofa in the living-room, pulling at the long strands of her hair, listening to her father watch a portable television in his bedroom, wishing he would get up and come and talk to her. Minutes passed, nothing happened. I could knock at the door, thought Violetta, but she didn’t. She got up and poured herself a glass of home-made lemonade and went to her room to study.
As she eased down her heavy school bag, it occurred to her that she should not have told Geraldine that they were going bankrupt. Her parents had not told her—it had required several nights of concentrated eavesdropping for her to find out, to paste the clues together, to convince herself that what they were saying was true. The business had failed, and it would not recover. Their house was going on the market. Everything was going to change. She shouldn’t have told Geraldine, and frightened her like that. Her mother would be cross.
Violetta bent over her desk and gave her head a shake. She took a deep sip of sour, bracing lemonade, and at once felt better, for a moment at least. It wasn’t so bad. That’s why her parents hadn’t told her what was happening. It wasn’t such a serious thing. People were always going bankrupt. It wasn’t so unusual or terrible, was it? Why, some people do it again and again and again. The thought made her hands tremble and she had to put the glass down or she would spill it. She couldn’t stand it to happen again. That would not happen to them—no, never—their mother would not allow it. This would be their only disaster, she was sure. They would move house, her father would get better, her mother would get a promotion and everything would be fine.
She pulled over her sweet-smelling, thick-paged physics textbook. Concentrate on the really important things, she told herself. Things that will last. Not the trivial little annoyances of everyday life …
Unaccountably, this thought brought to mind not the admirable laws of thermodynamics, but her boyfriend, Marcus. And as often happened when she remembered Marcus, Violetta sighed.
Marcus was the same age as Violetta and he had been her boyfriend for about six months. He was also full of brains—he and Violetta had met at an inter-school maths meeting for brainy people at the beginning of the year. Violetta found herself rather overpowered by Marcus. Not by his brains, which were considerable, but hers were equally so. It was his conversation. There was only one thing that interested him, and that was Africa.
Marcus was mad about Africa. Every aspect of Africa. Really, thought Violetta, if he had to have a place to be mad about, couldn’t he have picked Greenland or Antarctica? Africa had so many countries, so many people, so many animals, so many wars, so many languages, so many varieties of national dress. So much of everything to learn about and remember. And the thing about Marcus was, he expected her to be as interested as he was—he thought it was only natural.
Marcus had a lot of African friends. In fact, apart from her, he seemed to have only African friends. Until she had known Marcus, Violetta had to confess to never having met an African person in her life, but now she met them by the dozen. She mentioned this to Marcus, once, and he smiled in his very adult way.
‘You had a rather closed social circle before you met me, didn’t you darling?’ (He always called her darling, as if she were fifty, at least.)
Violetta felt like pointing out that you might just as well say that Marcus had a rather closed social circle himself, seeing the only people he ever saw were from Africa. They had rather lovely names, Violetta thought, Marcus’s African friends. Like Oliver, and William. They shook her hands enthusiastically and smiled kindly at her, but they always made her feel so weak and pale and small and somehow insignificant. Perhaps it had something to do with size—African people, well, the ones Marcus knew, seemed enormous.
She also found their accents difficult to understand—Violetta was used to the Hungarian accent of the grandmother of one of her school friends, but there appeared to be little relation between say, Ghanaian, and Hungarian accents, which was not perhaps surprising. With Marcus’s African friends she had to adopt various ruses, the alternate ‘oh’ and ‘hmmm’ and the occasional, more risky ‘that’s great’, quickly turned into a ‘I mean, how terrible’, if it was returned with an uncomprehending frown.
If she went to a film with Marcus, it was an African film. If they listened to music, it was African music. If they went to a restaurant, it was African. She found herself looking at Marcus out of the corner of her eye sometimes—could he be a little unbalanced? Certainly his parents were strange people, and they do say if you have strange parents, you can end up a bit odd yourself.
She had only met his parents once, on a visit that Marcus had proposed one afternoon as they were sitting together in the front garden. Marcus had ridden over on his bicycle as usual, and had propped it up against the garden furniture. Violetta gazed down at the pebbled ground while Marcus read aloud excerpts from a magazine called New African Poetry. Violetta’s mind was wandering, trying to surmise what the Old African Poetry might have been like, and whether it would have been more to her taste.
‘So what do you say?’
Violetta jumped.
‘Oh well …’ she said. ‘It’s quite …’
‘Just a cup of tea,’ said Marcus with a frown.
‘Oh, all right,’ replied Violetta, relieved, although she would prefer lemonade. ‘Shall we have it out here?’
Marcus frowned again. ‘Not now, darling. I mean when you come and visit my parents.’
‘Oh!’ Somehow she didn’t associate Marcus with parents. He seemed so very old. Even the first time she had seen him at the maths conference in his uniform, he had seemed aeons older than everyone else, including the teachers.
‘They always want to meet my girlfriends,’ Marcus went on, grandly, as if there had been a long string of girlfriends in the past, which Violetta frankly found hard to believe. Marcus was an acquired taste, like pickled eggplant or extra-dry vermouth. He would not appeal to every sixteen-year-old girl.
‘That’ll be great,’ said Violetta, weakly.
‘I’ll meet you at the bus-stop then,’ said Marcus. ‘About four, all right?’ And he bent his head back to the volume of New African Poetry.
So some days later, Marcus met her at the bus-stop, dressed rather more conservatively than usual, in black trousers and a white shirt. (At social occasions, Marcus often wore a traditional costume from Nigeria, which consisted of a long striped dress reaching to his ankles.)
‘Just a few streets down,’ he said, cheerfully striding ahead.
It was a wealthy-looking area, Violetta observed, high up on a hill with big white houses and views of the ocean. Marcus did not talk as they walked, concentrating on swinging to and fro the black umbrella which he always brought with him, and which Violetta had never actually seen him open. Which character was it in Batman that was always carrying an umbrella? The Penguin? Well, it was no use asking Marcus, as he never watched television, unless it was a documentary about Africa, of which there seemed to be a depressingly large number.
‘This is it,’ said Marcus, coming to a halt and pointing upwards with the umbrella’s tip.
Violetta peered up. It was a large, two-storey house, with a clean and spacious front lawn. Marcus opened the gate, and she followed him up the very thin paved path.
‘I think we’ll see Mother first,’ said Marcus. ‘Otherwise she might get difficult, you know.’ He pulled out a bunch of gold-coloured keys from his pocket, and fitted one in the front door.
‘Mother!’ he called, as he swung the door open.
Marcus’s mother was standing, rather disconcertingly, right on the doorstep. She was a short, middle-aged woman with long grey hair. She smiled very sweetly at Violetta but seemed to be at an utter loss as to what to say to her, or to her son, for that matter. Fortunately Marcus did most of the talking, as he probably had done for the past sixteen years. So they drank tea and ate orange-cream biscuits and listened to Marcus drone on. Violetta drank two cups, well-sugared, and found herself feeling quite relaxed with this quiet smiling woman who asked her no alarming questions.
‘Well,’ said Marcus eventually, finishing off the last biscuit. ‘Better go up and see the old man, Mother. You know what he’s like. Might get difficult.’
Marcus’s mother looked at him politely, as if she had no idea at all, but didn’t want to contradict him. Violetta shot a look at Marcus—what did he mean, go up?
‘Lovely to meet you,’ said Violetta, standing. ‘Thank you for the tea.’
Marcus leant over and kissed his mother’s cheek. ‘I’ll drop by later,’ he said kindly.
Drop by? Didn’t he live here? Violetta followed him out the front door, which he again locked with his gold-coloured key, and then up a side concrete stairway to the second floor of the house. Another key was produced, and a second door opened.
‘Father!’ called Marcus. He took Violetta’s hand and led her in to a pale green room with a long-furred white carpet. ‘My parents are divorced,’ he mentioned casually. ‘So separate quarters, naturally.’
‘Naturally!’ agreed Marcus’s moustached father, stepping forward and heartily shaking her hand. ‘Viola, how are you?’
‘Violetta, Father,’ said Marcus with a patient sigh. ‘A viola is a musical instrument, close relative of the violin.’
Later, Marcus explained to Violetta that his parents had been divorced since he was five years old, but had chosen to go on living in the same house, his father upstairs, and his mother under
neath. Marcus lived with his mother till he was eleven, then moved upstairs with his father—this had apparently been part of the divorce settlement. Marcus told her all this in such a worldly, matter-of-fact way, as if challenging her to suggest that this was not quite a common arrangement. And indeed, it might well be, for all Violetta knew. She could just imagine telling Geraldine about it, and Geraldine rolling her eyes and saying she knew thousands of people’s parents who lived like that, and honestly, if Violetta would only get her eyes off her textbooks for half a moment …
She drank another two cups of well-sugared tea with Marcus’s father, and two more orange-cream biscuits of the same brand. Did they do the shopping together, she wondered, pushing the trolley around the supermarket arguing over what to buy just like undivorced couples?
Except for the moustache, Marcus’s father was astonishingly like Marcus. He had a different obsession, though, which was something of a relief, as two people raving on about Africa would have been hard to take. Marcus’s father was interested in rudders. He had shelves of books about the history of the rudder throughout the house, and photographs of various rudders he had known through his long, apparently rudder-filled life. He had been to rudder museums all over the world, and even had a collection of pieces of celebrated rudders salvaged from wrecks in the South Seas and the Baltic, which were brought out and dutifully admired by Violetta.
Finally, at about half-past five, when it was already dark outside and Marcus’s father was struggling to remember just where he had picked up an indeterminate scrap of black wood that he had gently placed in Violetta’s hands like a live cockroach, Marcus stood up.
‘Well, Father, time to go, I’d say.’
‘Thank you for the lovely tea,’ said Violetta, leaping to her feet, surreptitiously placing the piece of sacred rudder on a nearby bookshelf. She hoped Marcus would at least walk part of the way with her to the bus-stop, as she was not quite sure of the direction. But Marcus had strong ideas about female independence, which coincided most frequently with his own comfort. ‘Just turn right at the second street,’ he instructed her, as he saw her out with a shiver. ‘It’s cold tonight, isn’t it, darling?’
The White Guinea Pig Page 4